The Open Innovation Exchange, which is promoting a new collaborative model for improving public services, has been nominated in the modernising government section of the New Statesman New Media Awards. I'm one of the judges, but won't be looking at that section, so I think it's OK for me to urge you to go to the nomination here and add your comment. Click the rating link and you can decide if we are worth any stars.
Just to be totally open about this (of course) the nomination arose because I met up with ace podcaster Nick Booth at the recent NS debate, told him all about the exchange and ended up being interviewed for Nick's blog. I guess I must have convinced him of the value of the project - so thanks Nick.
As Nick explains, and you can read here too, the original idea for the OIE was to develop collaboratively, in public, an "open source bid" for a £1.2 million tender put out by the Cabinet Office. The job is to create an exchange for third sector organisations to share knowledge and experience, so they can deliver better public services. We think that process has been a terrific success and we are in with a great chance of winning against 20 other bids. If we do, we'll invite the losers to join us; if we don't we'll have made a lot of friends and learned a lot.
In his post, Nick considers whether this is New Madness or New Model
New Madness?:
Clearly competitors know what you’re proposing and can nick the best ideas and neutralise or undermine others. The collaborators though placed copyright restrictions. Anything lifted from the bid had to be credited. If it was then developed and evolved competitors were asked to put that back onto the site. Naive? Perhaps, we’ll know eventually.
Who does the government deal with? A shifting collaborative process has many stakeholders, but ultimately the people handing out the money will want to know who’s head is on the block – who is resonsible for delivering. hat may give and internally generated single organisation a stornger hand.
After that though I’m struggling with the problem of madess because for me it is a really a ...
New Model:
Closed doors, closed minds. Cards to the chest bidding can lead to bidders being blind to the best ideas. The open source tender had at least 500 minds involved.
Planning and delivery are different.… Often the people who will have to deliver are not involved in the bid. Someone comes along to them afterwards and says we thought you could do this for this much money. The open process could solve many of those problems earlier.
It raises everyones’ game. With an open source bid in the frame all the competitors have find ways of beating that bid in terms of ideas and value for money. that can be good news for the public.
It builds flexibility into delivery. By collaborating openly at all stages it should be much easier to innovate along the life of the contract. It also creates transparency in delivering, which should make it easier for full feedback whilst the contract is delivered.
The winner can still involve the losers. As David says, if their bid wins one of the first things they’ll do is talk to the losers. likewise if another bid wins it may make sense for them to approach the consorium for input.
You never know where the ideas will come from. Online collaboration improves the chances of bright new notions coming form unexpected places.
It challenges old ways of working - which with government can often be a great thing.
Losing is a good thing – well not really, but if an open source bid fails a much wider range of people have learnt from the process and learnt from the failure.
As we developed our bid, it became clear that a lot of people were interested in what we were doing precisely because it could be a new model extending beyond the Third Sector Innovation Exchange. If we really want to modernise government it can't be done just from within, or through specifications and contracts tightly drawn up by those inside government.
We need new ideas on how to invent, as well as how to deliver.
If you would like to join in that discussion you can do below, at the Open Innovation Exchange, or maybe even better on the New Media Awards site, because that might help us win. Hope that's not too partisan. If we do win we will, of course, invite the losers to join in our further development.
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